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stared
back at her was gaunt and pale. Her violet eyes took up the
majority of her countenance. She made a face at herself to try to
give herself a dose of courage.
    She turned left and forced herself to put one foot
in front of another. All too quickly she found herself inches away
from the doorway that led to the den. Again she flattened herself
against the wall. She reviewed in her mind what she remembered
about the room from having seen it briefly earlier when she
arrived.
    The entire back wall of the room
was floor to ceiling glass with a sliding glass door that opened
out onto a wide patio. The room looked out over the back of the
wooded part of Mike’s family’s property. She remembered Margo
bragging that Mike’s family owned more property than anyone else in
town. Violet wondered if the intruders had come through that door,
and she was almost certain that had to have been the case;
otherwise, they would have walked right past Violet in the dining
room. Her chair had faced the doorway and she would have noticed
someone passing by.
    There was a large stone fireplace
on the far wall and matching leather sofas were set up facing each
other in the middle of the room. A flat-screen TV was over the
mahogany bar on the other side of the room and a foosball table
completed the entertainment area next to the bar. Violet listened
again for any sounds of life coming from the room but heard
nothing. That made her more nervous than anything. Surely she
should be hearing something. If the attack was a robbery, the
intruders should have been pilfering the house by now. But the
eerie noiselessness was unnerving. Some part of Violet wondered if
she was actually at home in her bed and this was all a very bad
dream.
    The moment of truth had arrived.
She knew that she couldn’t delay the inevitable any longer. She had
to make the decision to go forward, and Margo’s face sprung into
her mind. She tried to clear her head as best as possible, and then
she swung around to face the open doorway.
    Instantly her mind began to reel.
The first thing that hit her was the smell. It was like her nose
had been turned off before, but now that she could smell it, she
couldn’t smell anything else. It was coppery, thick, and pungent.
As her elbow came up to her nose to try to block it, her eyes
focused enough for her to wish that she had gone right for the
front door.
    Everywhere she looked, all she
could see was blood. It was smeared all over the walls of the room,
and she could see that it was even dripping from the light fixture
in the middle of the ceiling. Immediately she started to gag, but a
thought spun through her mind. Where were the bodies? With all of
the blood in front of her, there was almost no doubt that the
others were dead, but there was no sign of them.
    Her eyes began to water as they
went back out of focus, and she tried to call out to her friend.
“Margo?” She didn’t want to go into the room any further, but she
had to find Margo. She looked down too late as she took a tentative
step, and as her foot hit the puddle of blood inside the doorway it
slipped out from underneath her and with a wild shriek she started
to fall. As she fell backwards, she felt strong arms catch her
under her armpits and yank her back out of the room.
    Her body was whirled up and around
and her mind spun again from the sudden movement. She found herself
staring up into two violet eyes that looked familiar, but they were
framed by brown hair, not black. The rest of his face was caught up
in a snarl and his blinding white teeth were sharp and menacing.
Suddenly it was too much for Violet to process. The drugs, the
blood, the massacre, Margo missing, and now this man looking down
at her like he was going to kill her. Too many things swirled
together in an awful pattern. It couldn’t be a
coincidence.
    Closing her mind, Violet let herself go and slid
into darkness.
     

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    Violet woke up gagging. Her dreams
had been saturated with